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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature
What's "Really Real": David Foster Wallace And The Pursuit Of Sincerity In Infinite Jest, Henry Clayton
What's "Really Real": David Foster Wallace And The Pursuit Of Sincerity In Infinite Jest, Henry Clayton
Honors Theses
Throughout his literary career, David Foster Wallace articulated the problems associated with the profusion of irony in contemporary society. In this thesis I assert that his novel Infinite Jest promotes a shift from the reliance on irony and subversion to a celebration of the principles of sincerity. The emphasis on sincerity makes Infinite Jest a landmark novel in the canon of American fiction, as Wallace employs postmodern formal techniques, such as irony, metafiction, fragmentation, and maximalism, in the interest of promoting traditional, non-ironic values of emotion, community, and spirituality. I draw from works of postmodern theory and criticism to bolster …
American Dreams And Dystopias: Examining Dystopian Parallels In The Great Gatsby And To Kill A Mockingbird, Samuel Nathan Harris
American Dreams And Dystopias: Examining Dystopian Parallels In The Great Gatsby And To Kill A Mockingbird, Samuel Nathan Harris
Masters Theses
In this study I consider the recent trend of dystopian fiction in literature—both the broader genre of dystopias of the past century or so, and the contemporarily popular subgenre of young adult dystopian fiction—and examine whether certain American novels, while not typically considered dystopias, can fit into this genre or at least be established as having some parallels with works of this genre. Based on certain shared archetypes of the genre, such as “speculative myth,” a governing “ritual habit,” and a dissatisfied narrator or protagonist, I here propose that other American classics, specifically F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and …
Making Thought Matter : Postmodern Models For Material Thinking, James Kenneth Belflower
Making Thought Matter : Postmodern Models For Material Thinking, James Kenneth Belflower
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
Making Thought Matter: Postmodern Models for Material Thinking, crosses disciplines to trace the aesthetic contexts of Postmodern American artists whose work employs the senses to make legible creative and critical modes of synthesis. I contend that in practicing a material thinking—the artistic mobilization of the intimate and affective qualities of conceptual and physical surfaces—these artists reinsert perceptual knowledge and bodily agency into Postmodernism’s “emptied” surfaces. Consequently, their work opposes late theorists of Postmodernity who characterized contemporary artistic forms as immaterial, abstract, and emotionally deficient. To assess contemporary syntheses I develop Philip Johnson’s late International Style Glass House into an analogy …